The Origin of Tesloop

The impetus for Tesloop was born in May of 2015, when then 16 year old Haydn decided that based on his recent acquisition of a California Driver's’ license, he should figure out how to get a car for the summer. His father suggested that the proper path towards car ownership was getting a job for the summer.

Haydn had a long-standing interest in cars, and car tuning, so decided he wanted to get involved with automobiles in some manner.

After evaluating a variety of potential summer jobs, including auto-mechanic’s assistant, Haydn decided that his best option for a summer car, would be leveraging Tesla's "Happiness Guarantee", leasing a Tesla and driving people from LA to Las Vegas round-trip for hire. If things didn't work out, he would be able to return the car with no further obligation after three months.

His brief analysis indicated that he would need to make slightly over 1 round trip per week in order to cover the insurance and lease cost and that due to the Tesla “free long distance forever” charging policy, along with the amazing car warranty, he would have no other costs. While driving long distance would normally be a challenge, Haydn hoped that the new autopilot feature would make him much safer while driving, and possibly allow others to also drive with a low probability of accidents.

His father suggested he run the idea by Elon Musk, and so in June 2015, Haydn drove to Mt. View to the Tesla Motors shareholders meeting, where he presented to the idea in a question about Auto-pilot to Mr. Musk. Who in response, for the first time, gave a timeline for technical driving autonomy, which in this case Mr. Musk suggested would be possible in approximately 3 years, stating you would be able to sleep and the car would be able to drive itself (though it would take a few years for the regulations to legalize this).

This event was covered in a Vogue Magazine story about Elon Musk shortly thereafter.

With this fact in hand, Haydn presented his idea in detail to a group of early stage startup entrepreneurs (some of which had accompanied him to the meeting). They were working on a new startup in the remote photography space dubbed “The Money Shot”. After hearing the idea for Tesloop, and the comments Elon Musk made regarding the timing for autonomous driving, the team decided to abandon their fledgling photo concept in favor of joining Haydn on the Tesloop venture as a full-time effort.

So Tesloop was then turned into a full-fledged startup, and launched it's service less than 4 weeks later to Las Vegas. Shortly thereafter, Tesloop received some minimal seed funding from Clearstone Ventures, as well as angel investors from Facebook, Tesla Motors, and Allen & Co.

In the course of planning the commercial service during June, it became apparent that a large commercial insurance policy for a 16 year old, would be prohibitively expensive. Therefore, once commercial Vegas runs started in July, the other co-founders took on Piloting jobs, and Haydn began to primarily focus on corporate evangelism and public relations along with vehicle equipment selection, vehicle maintenance and general vehicle cleaning & upkeep.

In addition to working on Tesloop, Haydn is completing his studies as a senior at Agoura Hills high school and maintains an active interest in vehicles of many types.